LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK’s Assassination

Johnson’s success in brazenly stealing the 1948 Senate election, followed by a series of murders, gave him ever-increasing confidence to go further in his criminal activities. His involvement with the Billie Sol Estes scandals in the mid-1950s, through selling his powerful influence to facilitate the Estes frauds against the government, was widely reported on in 1962, yet he cunningly escaped indictment through sheer willpower, threats against Estes and at least five murders of men who could have connected him to the crimes, all of them still "unsolved cold cases" fifty years later. The murder of his sister Josefa was also directed by Johnson in this same period of time, according to Estes. As soon as that scandal had been swept under the rug in 1962, the Bobby Baker scandals followed in 1963, threatening to end his political career through certain censure by the Senate and Justice Department indictments to follow. The only way out for the vice president was to succeed the president, and that meant "He had to go" (which was exactly how Johnson phrased his orders to kill people who got in his way, according to U.S. Marshal Clint Peoples, who was eventually killed by persons unknown, twenty years after Johnson died).

The premise of the book, and the term "Mastermind", is that there had to have been one key person who was the single most important catalyst behind the JFK assassination who would have provided the "critical mass" required to bring all other elements together and held them together throughout the planning and execution of the 1963 coup d'etat. That person would have necessarily been someone who had the power to assure the others that they would succeed and be protected from discovery and prosecution afterwards; he would have to be someone who recruited and marshaled all the others and he would had to have influence across the federal government bureaucracy as well as the Texas state and local judicial and law enforcement agencies. Lyndon Johnson was uniquely positioned to fulfill all of these requirements and be able to provide the unifying "driving force" required to pull of "The Crime of the 20th Century."

It is an axiom in human relationships and group dynamics that such an audacious, potentially devastating trauma for the country (and the world), that would have meant death sentences for the culprits, had they been caught, would have required a powerful person behind it, who championed the cause from the start. A fundamentally important requirement was that such a singular, manic and obsessive person fill the role of the "driving force" behind would have been essential to ensure success and that person would have to be in a position to offer protection for everyone else involved (except, of course, the "patsy"). It could have therefore only succeed with such a "Mastermind" behind the wheel.

The notion that such a force could have emanated from a number of men working together to effect the murder of the president hinges on its being born and championed forcefully by multiple plotters at the same level of power. All of the men (or women) involved would have had to have been equally obsessed, similarly depraved and consistently sociopathic. Yet such a plot is not something that could have even been openly discussed among officials, certainly not deliberated at committee meetings in boardrooms on Wall Street in New York, or K Street in Washington, with votes taken according to Robert's Rules of Order, by equally responsible individuals. Such a notion falls is demonstrably improbable, at best.

Read LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination, for the complete story of how Lyndon B. Johnson manipulated people throughout his life to perform the most vile and heinous acts, leading up to the murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.